Can you expand? Having played it a bit I can confirm the toxicity, but curious to hear how the game design inherently promotes it anymore than other team vs team games.
Sure, team vs team games create the immediate game design consequence that if your teammates are terrible they can ruin your experience even if you are playing extremely well.
As a result good game design should limit the capacity of a single player to ruin the rest of their team’s experience. Obviously, this is a balance to find, limit this too much and the player no longer feels like they can impact the game for better or for worse. It goes beyond a balance though into the basic incentives and framing of the gameplay.
Take for example match length time, one of the ways a game can handle a player getting dealt a shitty hand with teammates is to have the match length be short enough that a player can just shrug their shoulders and discard the next 10 minutes or so from their competitive goals and just play the match out until it ends and they get matched with better teammates. Rocket League is a perfect example of this. Imagine if Rocket League had League Of Legends length matches. Imagine how much more toxic rocket league players would be to each other if getting matched with a shitty teammate meant having to play 40 minutes of frustrating, unfun gameplay with no coordination between teammates.
Another way team based competitive games can mitigate teammates being frustrating and not coordinating is by building the gameplay around it being easy and natural to coordinate with teammates. Take for example Apex Legends with it’s brilliant pinging system along with automated call outs, it makes coordination natural for players who might otherwise just fuck off and not coordinate (not that this doesn’t still happen). The equivalent system in a LOL type game would a simple way to non-verbally telegraph the rhythm of your next attacks to your teammates so that they could easily chain their moves with yours. Make it so the game is always displaying to your teammates what you are planning to do next so that it is maximally easy for your teammates to coordinate even if they don’t give a shit.
I have other examples but I think RTS games also struggle often with these things, in team games that go on for 20+ mins the losing team almost always starts to get angry and frustrated at each other even though… losing is literally 50% of the experience in playing a competitive RTS. That is bad game design in my opinion, losing isn’t going to be as fun as winning but there are ways to make players less likely to get genuinely upset with each other when they are losing. Take for example Titanfall 2’s end of the match blitz where the losing team has to try to get to escape drop ships, it gives individual players on the losing team something to fixate on pro-actively doing that can benefit them meaningfully instead of just letting the losing team check out from the gameplay and start blaming each other.
Really interesting answer thank you for that. The rocket league example really spoke to me, because I played that a lot and while there’s definitely a lot of toxicity too it’s, as you said, much lower stake, just some nasty emote spamming for 5min then you move on.
From my experience, for example one friend I played with would have a type of attack they’d want to do but a teammate would knock the enemy away at the wrong time so the attack misses. The combat ilicites stronger emotions than any other game I’ve played with these friends just in general. I haven’t played many others that one teammate can easily fuck up a battle for a team, which can cause a steamroll where a full 40 minute match can become impossible to win.
Can you expand? Having played it a bit I can confirm the toxicity, but curious to hear how the game design inherently promotes it anymore than other team vs team games.
Sure, team vs team games create the immediate game design consequence that if your teammates are terrible they can ruin your experience even if you are playing extremely well.
As a result good game design should limit the capacity of a single player to ruin the rest of their team’s experience. Obviously, this is a balance to find, limit this too much and the player no longer feels like they can impact the game for better or for worse. It goes beyond a balance though into the basic incentives and framing of the gameplay.
Take for example match length time, one of the ways a game can handle a player getting dealt a shitty hand with teammates is to have the match length be short enough that a player can just shrug their shoulders and discard the next 10 minutes or so from their competitive goals and just play the match out until it ends and they get matched with better teammates. Rocket League is a perfect example of this. Imagine if Rocket League had League Of Legends length matches. Imagine how much more toxic rocket league players would be to each other if getting matched with a shitty teammate meant having to play 40 minutes of frustrating, unfun gameplay with no coordination between teammates.
Another way team based competitive games can mitigate teammates being frustrating and not coordinating is by building the gameplay around it being easy and natural to coordinate with teammates. Take for example Apex Legends with it’s brilliant pinging system along with automated call outs, it makes coordination natural for players who might otherwise just fuck off and not coordinate (not that this doesn’t still happen). The equivalent system in a LOL type game would a simple way to non-verbally telegraph the rhythm of your next attacks to your teammates so that they could easily chain their moves with yours. Make it so the game is always displaying to your teammates what you are planning to do next so that it is maximally easy for your teammates to coordinate even if they don’t give a shit.
I have other examples but I think RTS games also struggle often with these things, in team games that go on for 20+ mins the losing team almost always starts to get angry and frustrated at each other even though… losing is literally 50% of the experience in playing a competitive RTS. That is bad game design in my opinion, losing isn’t going to be as fun as winning but there are ways to make players less likely to get genuinely upset with each other when they are losing. Take for example Titanfall 2’s end of the match blitz where the losing team has to try to get to escape drop ships, it gives individual players on the losing team something to fixate on pro-actively doing that can benefit them meaningfully instead of just letting the losing team check out from the gameplay and start blaming each other.
Really interesting answer thank you for that. The rocket league example really spoke to me, because I played that a lot and while there’s definitely a lot of toxicity too it’s, as you said, much lower stake, just some nasty emote spamming for 5min then you move on.
From my experience, for example one friend I played with would have a type of attack they’d want to do but a teammate would knock the enemy away at the wrong time so the attack misses. The combat ilicites stronger emotions than any other game I’ve played with these friends just in general. I haven’t played many others that one teammate can easily fuck up a battle for a team, which can cause a steamroll where a full 40 minute match can become impossible to win.
Ah yeah I see what you mean, that’s very true.
It hides information and dissuades communication
Two people can see drastically different things at the same time with no way to communicate it
You can type but low TTK and general lack of macro mean you are more apt to lose the game from doing so than win
Someone can be 0-5 in a different lane and you have no idea why, all you know is they have 5 deaths